Poiret [puzzled].  “Why, no.”

Bixiou.  “But he is paid by the government to do work, to mount guard and show off at reviews.  You may perhaps tell me that he longs to get out of his place,—­that he works too hard and fingers too little metal, except that of his musket.”

Poiret [his eyes wide open].  “Monsieur, a government clerk is, logically speaking, a man who needs the salary to maintain himself, and is not free to get out of his place; for he doesn’t know how to do anything but copy papers.”

Bixiou.  “Ah! now we are coming to a conclusion.  So the bureau is the clerk’s shell, husk, pod.  No clerk without a bureau, no bureau without a clerk.  But what do you make, then, of a customs officer?” [Poiret shuffles his feet and tries to edge away; Bixiou twists off one button and catches him by another.] “He is, from the bureaucratic point of view, a neutral being.  The excise-man is only half a clerk; he is on the confines between civil and military service; neither altogether soldier nor altogether clerk—­ Here, here, where are you going?” [Twists the button.] “Where does the government clerk proper end?  That’s a serious question.  Is a prefect a clerk?”

Poiret [hesitating].  “He is a functionary.”

Bixiou.  “But you don’t mean that a functionary is not a clerk? that’s an absurdity.”

Poiret [weary and looking round for escape].  “I think Monsieur Godard wants to say something.”

Godard.  “The clerk is the order, the functionary the species.”

Bixiou [laughing].  “I shouldn’t have thought you capable of that distinction, my brave subordinate.”

Poiret [trying to get away].  “Incomprehensible!”

Bixiou.  “La, la, papa, don’t step on your tether.  If you stand still and listen, we shall come to an understanding before long.  Now, here’s an axiom which I bequeath to this bureau and to all bureaus:  Where the clerk ends, the functionary begins; where the functionary ends, the statesman rises.  There are very few statesmen among the prefects.  The prefect is therefore a neutral being among the higher species.  He comes between the statesman and the clerk, just as the custom-house officer stands between the civil and the military.  Let us continue to clear up these important points.” [Poiret turns crimson with distress.] “Suppose we formulate the whole matter in a maxim worthy of Larochefoucault:  Officials with salaries of twenty thousand francs are not clerks.  From which we may deduce mathematically this corollary:  The statesman first looms up in the sphere of higher salaries; and also this second and not less logical and important corollary:  Directors-general may be statesmen.  Perhaps it is in that sense that more than one deputy says in his heart, ’It is a fine thing to be a director-general.’  But in the interests of our noble French language and of the Academy—­”

Poiret [magnetized by the fixity of Bixiou’s eye].  “The French language! the Academy!”